Script can't keep up with its larger-than-life lead

'Barney's Version' — 2 1/2 stars

January 20, 2011|By Michael Phillips | Tribune Critic

The everyday politics of a marriage, according to Izzy Panofsky, the father of Mordecai Richler's protagonist in "Barney's Version," are messy — like "pushing an avocado through a cheese grater." The film version of Richler's 1997 book acknowledges the mess and moosh of it all, and Paul Giamatti (who won a Golden Globe for his work here) is the right man to play Barney, explosive and regretful, wry and vicious by turns. Dustin Hoffman gets some choice scenes as Izzy, the retired Montreal cop with an eye for the ladies. Rosamund Pike shines as the third Mrs. Panofsky, the warm bath in contrast to the outsized portrayals provided by Minnie Driver, as the second; and Rachelle Lefevre, as the suicidal first.

Barney's life is a series of accidents, both fruitful and misery-inducing. The movie version of that life, directed by Richard J. Lewis, gives the adaptation an earnest go. But the script lacks juice. I wish I responded to this shrewdly acted, rather dutiful picture the way I did to the tumultuous Richler adaptation I saw and loved as a 13-year-old, "The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz," starring a vibrant young Richard Dreyfuss.

As conceived by the late Richler and revised by screenwriter Michael Konyves, Barney is a satyr and a striver, one of the big wheels of Montreal television, the producer of a long-running soap opera called "O'Malley of the North." Intensely devoted to his alcohol, his cigars and his pro hockey, Barney is a sodden romantic. The film, like the book, shuffles through his marital resume using out-of-order flashbacks, beginning with Barney as a young man in 1974 hanging out in Rome (it was Paris in the novel) with his pals, then in and out of one abrupt marriage, then back in Montreal for a second. He meets the love of his life (Pike) at his wedding to the second Mrs. P. (Driver).

The tone of Richler's novel is one of comic outrage, both inwardly and outwardly directed. There's a built-in limitation with the material; Barney's first two wives are shrill write-offs, acting in such a way as to justify his behavior and attitudes. (The narrative hook has to do with the mysterious, unsolved disappearance of Barney's drug addict writer friend, played by Scott Speedman.). Giamatti, not an actor given to fussiness or image maintenance, is more than ready to dive into the craziest excesses of this character. Director Lewis, though, never quite gets a handle on him. It's not a matter of insufficient audience empathy; with Richler, too much sentiment would kill every decent joke in a flash. It's a matter of looking at this complicated pain in the keister at a pleasant, diffident remove.